Investor proposing $120M Davos Resort

FALLSBURG — A woman once touted as the savior of Monticello's main street is back.

Victor Whitman

FALLSBURG — A woman once touted as the savior of Monticello's main street is back.

Manhattan investor Misa Chang plans to unveil this week a roughly $120 million golf course and spa/resort plan for the Town of Fallsburg community of Davos, where Chang's family owns hundreds of undeveloped acres.

The matriarch sat with her eldest daughter, Julie Chen, and other family members last week at the Brother Bruno Pizza Restaurant on Route 42, having just returned to Sullivan County from a trip to China. The family will host an invitation-only luncheon on Friday at the Davos ski lodge.

To infuse new life in the faded Big Vanilla resort, Chang is going after Chinese investors through the EB-5 program, set up so wealthy foreigners can get fast-tracked green cards in exchange for investing up to $1 million in projects that might create jobs in the U.S. Chen said the resort would eventually create 1,744 direct jobs and 3,000 indirect ones.

Plans sent to the Fallsburg Planning Board for Chang's concept includes a 101-room spherical shaped hotel, golf course and an organic greenhouse. She said the first phase will sit on roughly 200 acres, with two later phases largely undefined. She said some 100 condos will surround the golf course.

Chang, who opened a chain of Empire Szechuan Gourmet restaurants and was once named among the "100 smartest New Yorkers," swooped into Sullivan more than a dozen years ago, snapping up the Davos property along with several buildings on Broadway in Monticello.

Chen said the project is not dependent on passage of a constitutional amendment before voters in November that could bring casinos to the Catskills. She said the resort will be marketed as a destination for people interested in healthy living. It will one day have a spa offering traditional Chinese medicine and a holistic health counselor.

"I think we are unique on the East Coast and that we are only an hour and a half from New York City," Chen said. "We have a great advantage."

Chang's team includes the project developer Tommy Ting, another owner of a building on Broadway in Monticello who has struggled to pull off ambitious plans for the street. The resort's planner is Robert J. Tessier. The Davos project still requires final site plan approval.

Chen said the family has been biding its time waiting for the right opportunity to develop Davos.